August Hanning, Former Head of German Intelligence, Detained in Attempted Treason Probe

German federal prosecutors said Tuesday that August Hanning, a former chief of the country's foreign intelligence service, had been arrested on suspicion of attempted treason. Prosecutors allege that Hanning paid to gain access to secret documents and then used them to prepare an analysis for a foreign spy service. The foreign intelligence service was not named, and it was not immediately clear whether the analysis reached its intended recipient. The prosecutor's office said in a statement: "Hanning is strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, obtaining state secrets, attempted treason and espionage." According to prosecutors, five years after Hanning's seven-year tenure as head of the BND ended in 2005, he reached an agreement with a former BND office manager to obtain confidential intelligence information in exchange for money. The former office manager, identified only as Manfred D. under privacy rules, was also arrested Tuesday. Both men were scheduled to appear before a judge at the Federal Court of Justice. Prosecutors said D. is suspected of providing roughly 2,000 documents over the years, including classified material meant only for internal BND use and senior-level intelligence briefings at the chancellery. Prosecutors also said Hanning used classified information from D. to prepare an analysis for an officer of a foreign intelligence service and, over a period of years, exchanged political information with a representative of that agency. Hanning's arrest is the latest in a string of prominent espionage cases in Germany. In 1974, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned after it emerged that an East German spy had served as his close aide for nearly two years. In 1990, a senior West German counterintelligence official was exposed as having spied for East Germany throughout the 1980s; he was later convicted of treason.